PayPal vs. Patreon: Daily Income

I decided a long time ago for a number of reasons not to use Patreon. The TL;DR is it’s a financial tech startup run by a musician. Do I really need to go any further for any Tech folks that have been in this industry longer than 5 minutes? I went with using PayPal through a WordPress plugin, and have been both happy with the experience, and happy saving an extra 5% per transaction.

One of the things I have come to appreciate about PayPal which could be very good for many small endeavors is that for the recurring payments it pays out daily. So on any particular day I receive anywhere between 1 and a few dozen payments. For myself I have enough of a war chest that this doesn’t change much for me in particular, but if you have limited financial resources this could be a great thing. In Patreon your Patrons are simply charged at the first of each month:

On the 1st of the month- your patrons will be billed- (starting at midnight PDT (GMT-7:00))

So everyday I get a stream of income that I can use to help push Failed Normal forward. So if I needed to pay a writer I could just wait a couple of days for the revenue rather than have to wait up to a month to receive it. The other thing that I like is the system is setup to pay forward vs. backwards. This means when you sign up you are automatically billed $5 at the same time the recurring payments are setup. This means I get that revenue upfront, and it prevents people from trying to scam the system by signing up, and then cancelling before they get billed.

Overall I’m very happy with PayPal and the WordPress plugin. I would highly recommend any content creator look at doing things this way instead of using Patreon. Patreon takes an extra 5% ($50 out of $1000), you only get paid monthly, and you’re at the whims of a platform that still doesn’t fully understand who it serves.